Re: Import / Export Functions and other features missing for academic and office use in urban planning

[John Darrington]

On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 06:36:05PM +0200, Roman Seidl wrote:
     I was confused when mentioning ODT - which seem to work for the output
     (which is certainly very nice to have). 
     
     I was actually thinking about ODS, XLS or DBF as a means to import and
     export the current dataset.
     
     I could not find out how to import ODS in 0.7.7 though Wikipedia (well
     Wikipedia...) claims it should be possible (s.
     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSPP, last modified on 30 January 2011 at
     04:03). 
     
     The only way to get Data out of PSPP for now seems to be exporting to a
     text file which is a quite tedious job as the docs seem to be rather bad
     and there is no such thing as a wizard.
     
I'm rather interested to know why you place so much importance on exporting the
data.  I've always considered PSPP (and spss) as a tool to analyse data, not
(primarily) to process it.  Therefore, there are a number of ways in which you
can import data, and there are a number of formats to which you can export the 
results of your analysis (ie, the tables showing  T-test, Anova, etc).  However,
like you say, exporting data hasn't been a feature upon which the developers 
have placed great emphasis.

But the fact that you are wanting to export data from PSPP seems to suggest that
you're using it primarily for its data manipulation capabilities (eg, SORT, 
FLIP,
AGGREGATE etc) rather than for performing statistical analysis.

Can you give a typical workflow example of your usage?  And what features do you
actually use within PSPP (between having got the data in, and getting it back 
out
again)?

J'

-- 
PGP Public key ID: 1024D/2DE827B3 
fingerprint = 8797 A26D 0854 2EAB 0285  A290 8A67 719C 2DE8 27B3
See http://pgp.mit.edu or any PGP keyserver for public key.

signature.asc
Description: Digital signature